IST Lunch Bunch

An extensive corpus of ancient Mesopotamian (ca 1800--100 BCE) scribal knowledge survives
in the form of text series entitled umma P If P. The if P then Q statements establish systematic
correspondences between visible, imaginable or conceivable physical phenomena on one hand, and
events in the human social world on the other. They represent the written repertoire of ominous signs, the
focus of scholarly divination. This talk is concerned with the conditional formulation of omens and their
particular style of reasoning.